At least five businesses have alleged senior officers in the Defence Science and Technology Organisation have plagiarised their intellectual property for their own research and then passed it on to business partners to develop a rival product. They also allege there is a âoerogue element within the agencyâ and a âoeculture of circling the wagons when confronted with allegations against themâ.

And there are fears that IP plagiarising could increase with the Labor government last year implementing the Defence Trade Controls Act, which seeks to limit Australian businesses or individuals supplying technology to someone outside of Australia without first revealing their IP to the Australian government.

Brendan Jones, a Brisbane-based small businessman, spent 12 years of his life developing his revolutionary Kestrel Tactical Simulator, a PC-based professional military platform that simulates air, sea, land and space operations anywhere on the planet. The program simulated various transport modes, weaponry, radars and other sensors.

âoeIt realistically simulated injuries,â Jones explained to Crikey. âoeA shot soldier would start bleeding at a rate appropriate for the wound, and would have to get medical attention, say, via a medivac before they went into shock. I spent many years studying warfare intently to make it as accurate an experience as possible.â

Jones wanted to sell the software to the Defence Department but he was told he must go through DSTO. The government organisation looked at it but eventually recommended against funding the project because it was âoeimpossible to do on a PCâ. Jones battled on.

âoeI developed the software myself from my own savings, but when I finished, DSTO tricked ADF into believing the software wouldnâ(TM)t ship for several years. They then gave my IP to scientists I had been warned were plagiarising private sector research, broke a non-disclosure agreement, and three months later they commissioned their business partner to produce a rival version known as BattleModel,â Jones said.

Crikey understands BattleModel only began as an air simulator while Jonesâ(TM) KTS was multi-domain (land, sea, air and space) and in particular had excellent maritime simulation capability that was a major attraction to the Navy. An independent investigator appointed by the ADF to investigate the theft of IP told Jones: âoeYour software and the DSTO BattleModel software were remarkably similar. When I started this case I couldnâ(TM)t see any similarities between KTS and BattleModel. Now I canâ(TM)t see anything they donâ(TM)t have in common.â

Most people Crikey spoke to were unwilling to speak on the record due to a fear of upsetting existing business contracts with the ADF. A CEO of a major defence industry organisation told Crikey the organisation was aware of three recent cases where the DSTO had plagiarised a small business and run off with its ideas. âoeIâ(TM)m the first to say there are two sides to every story, but as more instances came up and I thought this is starting to happen a bit much,â the CEO said. âoeThe first person you think, well, he might be a bad businessman and didnâ(TM)t protect his IP, but then you start hearing of other people, and now Iâ(TM)ve had three cases across my desk, and Iâ(TM)m beginning to think that there is some sort of a systemic problem within the organisation.â

One of the businesspeople considered taking legal action but decided not to fight the department as he suffered a nervous breakdown during protracted negotiations. In a confidential email to the CEO, he said:

âoeJust letting you know that I am finished now. DMO cancelled all of my contracts; DSTO awarded my last contract to xxxxx who had been given access to all of my IP and processes by DSTO so thereâ(TM)s nothing left for me to do now. All the work I developed and pushed with xxxxx will

...that industrial espionage, not "terrorism", is the real purpose for storage capacity of the magnitude of the NSA's Utah facility.

Not that any other government that can, won't. Eventually business will be sorted into those who have "government connections", and those who don't--the former collecting the latter's innovations and work product en masse (thus, essentially, their lives), and putting them out of business.

But that's irrelevant. As I said, I expect any given country to follow suit (and they have done so historically)--just that Internet-scraping gives a vastly more-efficient mechanism for it, a fact which the NSA is well aware. It's an issue of principle, and it applies regardless of who is doing it. The scale just increases the potential damage.

The NSA would be very interested in all Australia emerging mil tech issues.
"Bezaley tells of US code crack"http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/we-cracked-us-code-beazley/2007/09/20/1189881668071.html [smh.com.au]
e.g. US mil says "No" to Australia on some mil sales and upgrades - what does Australia do? Try and lobby around the US restrictions and then just work around US mil export grade equipment.. sharing with outside firms and brands..until the work is done to Australian needs.
The US also knows Australia has di

Governments place themselves ABOVE IP laws when it comes to so called 'national defence'. You don't think, for instance, the Americans told the Russians to stop work on nuclear weapons, because the yanks had patented all the technology provided by the international scientists that America had accumulated from the period of WW2 and after?

Patents are civilian mechanisms- always have been and always will be. No nation will allow issues of 'defence' to be hamstrung by issues of who invented what. So why are the owners of Slashdot pushing this NON-STORY? There is always an agenda here. Let me guess, Slashdot is about to start pushing the line that Iran are 'bad guys' cos all their civilian nuclear technology was invented by Israelis, or some other such zionist garbage. Are we about to see another attempt to get the sheeple behind anti-Iranian propaganda, using this new tactic.

And yes, before the usual vile shills dribble about how THIS story is about a nation in the West, I should point out this is simply the tactic of LEGITIMISATION- first of all establish a false principle, and then use that false principle to attack your real 'enemy'.

And let me make another thing clear. IF the excuse of ignoring IP laws for defence work leads to patent abuse using to give commercial advantage in NON-defence industries, the patent holders can take action in civil courts. The route by which the infringement happened is NOT a defence against prosecution.

So, again ALL nations steal each others secrets when making war weapons, or systems that serve the same, and this is TOTALLY legal. There are, and never will be any UN conventions or treaties prohibiting such behaviour (see if you can figure out why). But, this fact does NOT protect ordinary non-defence companies in the same nations if they infringe IP laws, even if they were given the information to do so by people working in the defence fields. This is not a difficult thing to understand.

This sounds fine at first blush, but since most 'war work' these days is contracted out to private companies it's clear that it can be very hard to define where the legal part ends and the illegal part starts.

they didn't even in tougher times.during ww1 and ww2 patents were paid both ways, even for shit like guns. IP law lobbyists trump even spies and generals. maxim made a shitload of money by licensing his gun to everyone's armies(and none of them copied it without paying license fees! even when they were going to have war with the nation the license fees would flow into!).

there's no exemptions for this stuff in the laws(of western nations), there's no rule that if an invention is for killing then patents don't count...

so shut up, ok? excusing blatant law breaking because "it's the government so it's ok!" is just pure shit. furthermore it's usually some company breaking it and selling the results to said government.. industrial espionage - with winners chosen by NSA - for kickbacks. it twists capitalism and makes some non-democratically chosen people very powerful so have fun with that then...

Well, there is the invention secrecy act in the US. Not quite what the guy was getting at, but not completely unrelated either.

But otherwise, yeah, that AC is an idiot. First clue should have been his conspiracy theory about slashdot preparing to go anti-iran for nuke patents. Because the slashdot crowd is so pro-patent that would have any meaningful effect on our opinion of iran.

This was the actual text from Clayton Utz, the law firm acting for the Australian Department of Defence: "“The reason we believe your claim will fail is because you allege that the Commonwealth owes innovators submitting products or technology for evaluation a duty of care to ensure that the evaluations are either fair, proper and accurate or that the confidential information is respected. There is no such duty of care in Australian law.”

They are very disingenuous: The DSTO publicly solicits businesses to submit inventions to Defence under the "DSTO CTD Capability and Technology Demonstrator Program", and then screw them over behind closed doors.

It costs about $2M to litigate the gov. I don't know of a single company who has seen litigation through: SMEs can't afford it, and the large companies said litigating their biggest customer would lose future contracts. The only law firms capable of taking on the government pro bono in Australia are all on retainer to them! Here's a very good book "Our Corrupt Legal System" by an investigative crime journalist; Page 157- describes all the dirty tricks lawyers play: http://netk.net.au/Whitton/OCLS.pdf [netk.net.au] . play.

> Criminal charges and ten years hard time for researchers who communicate with their international peers (y'know, the ones from "peer review") is hardly a non-story, friend.

Exactly, and that's why the universities hate it so much: That's the way they do research; by collaborating with peers.

The University of Sydney Deputy Vice Chancellor of Research warned: "Our researchers may have lost their ability to freely conduct public-good research and communicate research results... This legislation could

Absolutely, and what one company who lost a lot due to thefts did was simply refuse the DSTO physical access to their facilities. But under the DTCA they can no longer do that; they *must* let them in, give access, office space, etc. Defence can also issue a company with an order to turn over IP. Penalties for refusing are fines and jail time.

In the US the Economic Espionage Act is actually quite strong legislation for protecting trade secre

Under the Public Figure Doctrine US journalists can report corruption in a timely manner. In Australia we have nothing like that - not even a public interest test - so journalists must sit on stories for years. The Australian media couldn't even tell the people of New South Wales that their Premier (Governor) was manifest

Yes, under this US government the attacks on whistleblowers and pressure on the media to kiss ass has never been higher, but you still have a constitution and a bill of rights that can put things right. We in Australia simply don't have that.

Well, sorry for the inflammatory parent post but it did get people's attention (yours among others).

You obviously know more about the situation in Australia than I do, and disabling the freedom of the press will definitely encourage corruption.

From the article however it appears that Australian civil servants regularly misappropriate technical information that comes to them under certain state-security statutes and then turn around and hand it to commercial parties of their choice to develop into produ

> I honestly don't understand how these people can sleep at night. As a civil servant you're supposed to serve the people that employ you, not steal their work under cover of security statutes. And as for those "scientists" plagiarising (i.e. putting their own name on) ideas and inventions handed to them by state security... words fail me.

These people are a very strange breed. They have a sense of self-entitlement, and because they are taxpayer funded there's no need to be efficient. If you don't me

The second part seems to be what is happening (and it incorporates the entire first paragraph, plus the missing bits to qualify as plagiarism). They're taking IP wholesale, delivering it to another company, and that company claims it's their own work.

Are they claiming to have invented something? If so, they are engaging in some form of fraud at least similar to plagiarism, but it would seem more likely that they are using the trade secret as a trade secret themselves. If they don't claim it's their own work, it's not plagiarism.

Is that it is created and published under the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial 3.0 Australia licence. Perhaps the answer is to open source everything and just give up on trying to patent anything anymore, at least in Australia.

To Judge: Your Honor, the defendant PURPOSELY and MALICIOUSLY obtained our client's, ah-herm, music, and proceeded to produce an in-tune, harmonic, and lyrics-actually-make-sense version of her song. This Is Intolerable for the future integrity of music!

Just THINK of the embarrassment and harassment endured by our client as someone rendered a better melodic performance than her. For Lady Gaga, this corruption of her musical interpretation is outrageous and must be stopped at all costs to uphold the honor